Boscoreale.
In 1900 were discovered 1st-c. Roman
murals in a villa at this site near Pompeii.
Boscoreale is a comune
and town in the province of Naples, Campania, located in
the Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio under the slopes of
Mount Vesuvius, known for the fruit and vineyards of
Lacryma Christi del
Vesuvio. There is also a fine Vesuvian lava stone
production.
The neighborhood Monte
Bursaccio, which was overcome by the eruption of
Vesuvius in 79 CE that obliterated and preserved its
better-known neighbors, Pompeii and Herculaneum, is
famous for the frescoes of its aristocratic villas,
excavated before World War I. A hoard of Roman silver
and coins that had been hurriedly stashed in a cistern
for protection at the time of the eruption was also
recovered in Boscoreale in 1895, and divided among
museums, including the Louvre.
Boscoreale, about a
kilometer north of Pompeii of which it was an expansive,
more rural outlying suburb, was notable in antiquity for
having numerous aristocratic country villas and was
preserved as a hunting park - hence its name, meaning
"Royal Grove" - by the kings of Naples.
The villa of P. Fannius
Synistor (see Villa Boscoreale) was built and decorated
shortly after mid-first century BC. The quality of its
frescoes seems to have preserved them from changes in
fashion, before the villa was entombed in the eruption.
The Antiquarium of
Boscoreale was founded in 1991 by the Soprintendenza
archeologica di Pompei thanks to the finds from Pompeii,
Herculaneum, Oplontis, Stabiae, Terzigno, and Boscoreale
and to a didactic apparatus.
The neighboring
Boscotrecase yielded some elite works of art to
excavators at the same time, in particular at the Villa
of Agrippa Postumus, also known as the Imperial Villa or
the Villa of Augusta.
Roman fresco from Boscoreale, 43-30 BCE, Metropolitan
Museum of Art
